We’ve been looking forward to this moment for over three years, and it’s finally
here. Django 1.0 represents a the largest milestone in Django’s development to
date: a Web framework that a group of perfectionists can truly be proud of.

Django 1.0 represents over three years of community development as an Open
Source project. Django’s received contributions from hundreds of developers,
been translated into fifty languages, and today is used by developers on every
continent and in every kind of job.

An interesting historical note: when Django was first released in July 2005, the
initial released version of Django came from an internal repository at revision
number 8825. Django 1.0 represents revision 8961 of our public repository. It
seems fitting that our 1.0 release comes at the moment where community
contributions overtake those made privately.

The release of Django 1.0 comes with a promise of API
stability and forwards-compatibility. In a nutshell, this means that code you
develop against Django 1.0 will continue to work against 1.1 unchanged, and you
should need to make only minor changes for any 1.X release.

Since Django 0.96, we’ve made over 4,000 code commits, fixed more than 2,000
bugs, and edited, added, or removed around 350,000 lines of code. We’ve also
added 40,000 lines of new documentation, and greatly improved what was already
there.

In fact, new documentation is one of our favorite features of Django 1.0, so we
might as well start there. First, there’s a new documentation site:

The Django administrative interface (django.contrib.admin) has been
completely refactored; admin definitions are now completely decoupled from model
definitions (no more classAdmin declaration in models!), rewritten to use
Django’s new form-handling library (introduced in the 0.96 release as
django.newforms, and now available as simply django.forms) and
redesigned with extensibility and customization in mind. Full documentation for
the admin application is available online in the official Django documentation:

Django’s internals have been refactored to use Unicode throughout; this
drastically simplifies the task of dealing with non-Western-European content and
data in Django. Additionally, utility functions have been provided to ease
interoperability with third-party libraries and systems which may or may not
handle Unicode gracefully. Details are available in Django’s Unicode-handling
documentation.

Django’s object-relational mapper – the component which provides the mapping
between Django model classes and your database, and which mediates your database
queries – has been dramatically improved by a massive refactoring. For most
users of Django this is backwards-compatible; the public-facing API for database
querying underwent a few minor changes, but most of the updates took place in
the ORM’s internals. A guide to the changes, including backwards-incompatible
modifications and mentions of new features opened up by this refactoring, is
available on the Django wiki.

To provide improved security against cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities,
Django’s template system now automatically escapes the output of variables. This
behavior is configurable, and allows both variables and larger template
constructs to be marked as safe (requiring no escaping) or unsafe (requiring
escaping). A full guide to this feature is in the documentation for the
autoescape tag.

A project over a year in the making, this adds world-class GIS (Geographic
Information Systems) support to Django, in the form of a contrib
application. Its documentation is currently being maintained externally, and
will be merged into the main Django documentation shortly. Huge thanks go to
Justin Bronn, Jeremy Dunck, Brett Hoerner and Travis Pinney for their efforts in
creating and completing this feature.

Django’s built-in FileField and ImageField now can take advantage of
pluggable file-storage backends, allowing extensive customization of where and
how uploaded files get stored by Django. For details, see the files
documentation; big thanks go to Marty Alchin for putting in the
hard work to get this completed.

Thanks to a lot of work from Leo Soto during a Google Summer of Code project,
Django’s codebase has been refactored to remove incompatibilities with
Jython, an implementation of Python written in Java, which runs Python code
on the Java Virtual Machine. Django is now compatible with the forthcoming
Jython 2.5 release.

Classes are now included in django.contrib.contenttypes which can be used to
support generic relations in both the admin interface and in end-user forms. See
the documentation for generic relations for details.

Although Django’s default behavior of having a model’s save() method
automatically determine whether to perform an INSERT or an UPDATE at the
SQL level is suitable for the majority of cases, there are occasional situations
where forcing one or the other is useful. As a result, models can now support an
additional parameter to save() which can force a specific operation.

Django’s CacheMiddleware has been split into three classes:
CacheMiddleware itself still exists and retains all of its previous
functionality, but it is now built from two separate middleware classes which
handle the two parts of caching (inserting into and reading from the cache)
separately, offering additional flexibility for situations where combining these
functions into a single middleware posed problems.

A number of features and methods which had previously been marked as deprecated,
and which were scheduled for removal prior to the 1.0 release, are no longer
present in Django. These include imports of the form library from
django.newforms (now located simply at django.forms), the
form_for_model and form_for_instance helper functions (which have been
replaced by ModelForm) and a number of deprecated features which were
replaced by the dispatcher, file-uploading and file-storage refactorings
introduced in the Django 1.0 alpha releases.

If you’re using multiple table model inheritance, be aware of this caveat: child models using a custom
parent_link and to_field will cause database integrity errors. A set of
models like the following are not valid:

Django attempts to support as many features as possible on all database
backends. However, not all database backends are alike, and in particular many of the supported database differ greatly from version to version. It’s a good idea to checkout our notes on supported database:

This document is for Django's development version, which can be significantly different from previous releases. For older releases, use the version selector floating in the bottom right corner of this page.